Soviet Foreign Policy and the End of the Postwar Era

The patterns of international power established in 1945, which pitted the United States and the Soviet Union against one another in a global competition for power and influence, seem to be dissolving. Though the two countries are still the dominant military powers, they no longer dominate the international landscape as they did only a few years ago. As occurred in the United States more than a decade ago, the Soviet leadership has begun to recognize the objective limitations placed on its ability to control global events (Izyumov and Kortunov, 1988). Evidence of this can be seen in developments in Soviet policy on arms reductions, the Soviet withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the encouragement given client states to resolve conflicts in Cambodia and Angola, and the apparent permitting (even encouraging) of greater autonomy among subject nationalities in Eastern Europe and the USSR itself. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev explains this policy shift in terms of “new political thinking” that recognizes the realities of global interdependence and the potentially disastrous implications for the human race of global problems such as nuclear warfare or growing ecological damage (Gorbachev, 1986a, pp. 18–19, 55, 64). Gorbachev and other Soviet political leaders have relegated class warfare, the key concept in Marxist socialism for more than a century, to a secondary position as a determinant of Soviet foreign policy (Zagladin, 1988; Plimak, 1987). More important, they argue, is overcoming the threat to human existence posed by global problems.